“I assure you, I am Captain Picard.”
Well here it is, the got-dang silliest premise in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the one that should have been this series’ “Spock’s Brain;” an idea so stupid you’re amazed any credible professional actually said it aloud in a story meeting. The one where the crew… gets turned into kids. This is a bizarre, flatly preposterous idea for a show, and if Next Gen weren’t so utterly unapologetic about it, from the title down (I mean – “Rascals”! How cute is that!), it would probably be a wall-to-wall disaster.
Instead? It’s a giddily adorable highlight of Season Six. I guess I just have a fondness for commitment: because anytime you’re gonna do something this outrageous, you’ve gotta commit.
“Hello, Whoopi Goldberg? This is Star Trek calling. We need you to come in. Don’t worry, you only need to shoot for an hour – for the majority of the episode, Guinan will be played by a sassy 12-year-old.”
Among the many close shaves that keep “Rascals” from being awful is the kid casting, which largely works across the board. It’s quite a nice idea to bring David Tristan Birkin back to the show a second time; he played Picard’s nephew in “Family,” and with the barest indication of a moustache forming on his 14-year-old upper lip, he does a fine job as the shrunken Picard here. It’s not an exact facsimile of Stewart’s mannerisms, but it’s close enough, and Birkin’s such a welcome presence that I can pretty much forgive him anything. On blu-ray, the detail in the performance really springs out. It was the first time I realized, watching the episode, that the kid must have been flat-out terrified shooting this show. He doesn’t just have the lead role in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but he’s playing every single scene against actors, and an audience, with vast awareness of the genuine article. Birkin acquits himself well.
The other three kids are a bit more hit and miss, but no single performance is a failure. Megan Parlen, as skinny-ass Kid Ro, is my favourite, and her buddy-movie runner with Kid Guinan is a lot of fun. The O’Brien family situation is by far the weirdest, as exemplified by the scene when Miles takes young Keiko home. “Hi, you’re my sexual partner! You don’t have pubic hair yet! Coffee?”
The episode spends too much time trying to explain how the fuck this could possibly have happened, when the reality is that no explanation short of a visit from Q could have realistically justified it. (And flashing back to the concerns raised in “Realm of Fear,” if it were even remotely possible that a transporter could indiscriminately fail to copy certain elements of our DNA, no one would ever, ever use one.) The episode is a lot better when the Ferengi show up and (again, rather improbably) hijack the ship, and we get to play Die Hard on the Enterprise (Junior Edition). This leads to a gag so silly it only enhances my esteem for the whole thing, when Junior Picard trips over a casual mention of “Number One,” and declares that Riker is his “Number One Dad!” And then they hug. Commitment: it’s awesome.
Liner notes:
- This is Hana Hatae’s first appearance as Molly O’Brien – she’d go on to take the character almost all the way to tweenage on Deep Space Nine.
- This is also the first episode directed by Adam Nimoy, a.k.a. Leonard’s son.
- And “Rascals” must have been the only time in my life I was ever happy to see Alexander. Finally, in this bizarro world, he fits.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Six is finally in stores.